California Plaza

Barry Siegel's excellent article ("Dilemmas of Settling in Secret," April 5) raised the vitally important question about the practice of "sealing" court records as a condition of settling lawsuits. Secrecy agreements--the sealing of court records to protect the information contained within--have become more commonplace over the last few years as defendants in civil lawsuits demand that files be closed to the public to prevent public exposure.

The Times' brief article ("Stairway Linking Old and New L.A. Opens," Metro, Oct. 5) underscores our need to have an architecture and urban design critic as a regular member of your editorial staff. The article fails to put the steps in context. Readers should have been informed about the range of existing cultural, recreational and business destinations that are now accessible to pedestrians. Readers might have been given a diagram showing the immediate linkages to Arco Plaza and other Figueroa destinations and the thousands of employees who might now visit Museum of Contemporary Art at lunchtime, or vice versa, the thousands of employees on Bunker Hill who will be able to use the Central Library with ease, or go to an extraordinarily re-created Pershing Square; or the hundreds of thousands of us who will arrive and leave from a Metro Rail station on the east side of Pershing Square and have access to urban pathways and open space not yet in place, but about to be realized.

From the distant vantage point of the Harbor and Santa Monica freeways, downtown Los Angeles is beginning to look more and more interesting. The recently topped crown of the cylindrical First Interstate World Center, fashioned by the architectural office of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, glistens, as do the wall panels being applied to the 777 Tower designed by Cesar Pelli.

The California Plaza Spiral Court, now being pressed into service as an outdoor amphitheater for concerts sponsored by the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, makes a delightful venue for alfresco summertime art-and-entertainment. Saturday, a near-capacity crowd sprawled on the steps and lingered at nearby cafe tables to take in two locally based ensembles: Kinnara Taiko traditional Japanese drummers and Jazz Dancers Inc.

For as many years as I can remember, I've looked forward to the Sunday Times Real Estate Section, always expecting to read about the major players in Southern California's dynamic real estate marketplace and about the trends being established by builders and developers in the area. I even look forward to Sam Hall Kaplan's commentary on the above, although I seldom agree with him. The front page always managed to generate excitement with news and photographs of the latest grandiose monument downtown or perhaps a new planned community in Riverside County.

Construction will begin Monday on the second phase of California Plaza in downtown Los Angeles. Planned for the Bunker Hill site at 4th Street and Grand Avenue is a second office tower, 52 stories high, a one-of-a-kind urban garden/performance plaza and a retail area for restaurants and shops. The $326-million project is expected to be completed in 1992, adding a new dimension to California Plaza as part of the developing "cultural corridor" of downtown Los Angeles shared by Museum of Contemporary Art, the as-yet-to-be-built Disney Concert Hall, the Dance Gallery, the Spiral Court and the Central Performance Plaza.

Angel's Flight, the city's late, lamented 325-foot-long incline railway, is closer than ever to climbing up and down Bunker Hill once again, thanks to a decision Thursday by the Cultural Affairs Commission. The revival of Angel's Flight, which opened in 1901 and made its last nickel trip up the hill at 3rd Street in 1968, has been closely tied to the fate of California Plaza, an 11-acre commercial redevelopment project atop Bunker Hill that ran afoul of the Cultural Affairs Commission earlier this year.

A Los Angeles design team headed by architect Barton Myers has been selected for the U.S. Pavilion at the World's Fair to be held in Seville, Spain, in 1992. The Myers team selection, announced Friday by the U.S. Information Agency, chooses "a building that will establish an image of America that highlights its vitality and creativity in the field of design and which conveys the spirit of a dynamic society confident of its talents and its abilities." Titled "Re-Discover the U.S.A.

Barton Myers Associates Architects/Planners has been selected to be the master planner and architect for two upcoming residential phases of the northern part of California Plaza on Bunker Hill. The master plan and design is expected to be approved by the Community Redevelopment Agency early this summer, and the residential phases, known as 2B and 3B, are scheduled to be under construction in 1991 and 1994, respectively. The project will include 750 residential units and associated retail and parking to be built in three phases.

California Plaza in downtown Los Angeles appears to be back on its wobbly track again with the preliminary approval by the city's Cultural Affairs Commission of the latest revision in the ambitious plans for the billion-dollar-plus project.